Meming the Catch-22: Doing security where the steel wheel hits the rail

Abstract

While Internet memes are often treated as artifacts which play with broad cultural elements, they can also take on distinctive meanings within narrow communities of practice or organizational membership. This article demonstrates how interrogating a certain interpretation of a meme, and a sort of humor found within it, can reveal elements of viewers’ situated experience. In other words, I argue that when we get a joke, we begin to understand a world. I examine the particular reception of a meme — a parody of a familiar New York City subway security poster — by workers in that subway system, and show how a dark gallows humor they found in the meme draws from problems in their workplace. In turn, the world betrayed by that gallows humor illustrates challenges to organizational efforts and public policy to confront emergencies and crises. Unpacking the humor and even ridicule seen in memes in specific organizational and work settings, this article suggests, can offer shortcuts to reveal overlooked — but vital — perspectives in critical contexts.